New Korean horror “Epitaph” will explores a scary story of a hospital morgue, serial killings and some rather strange doctors. With its intriguing plot, this movie is become one of the summer’s most highly anticipated horror film. Set in 1940’s Seoul during the long Japanese occupation, and locate against an attractive setting, rather than a sinister haunted house, it creates a uniquely eerie ambiance. Epitaph is also a debut film for the Jeong Brothers (Jeong Beom-sik and Jeong Sik), which create a refined, intelligent and surprisingly efficient gothic horror, along with well cast and acted.
The story has several flashbacks and time lag structure, but it does not devolve into a confusing mess, which is a huge relief. It’s generally divided into three segments. The first part begins when Dr. Park receives an old photo album from his 20’s in 1941, when mysterious things captured him and his colleagues in a modern hospital, these doctors witness weird events and learn that death is the sole healer. Park was bound by his parents to marry a girl, whom he never met, but he find himself attracted to a stunning looking young girl’s dead body, allegedly a victim of a failed double suicide, who happened to be his arranged marriage. The second segment is a tale of a little girl named Asako, she was carried into theBut after the incident, the awful ghost of her mother always haunting her, a doctor named Lee who convinced that this only an effect of her guilty feeling, attempts to cure her. On the third segment, it going across the previous two odd stories, a married couple doctors returned to the hospital from Tokyo and find themselves wrapped up in some serial murders of Japanese soldiers, and soon plunged into a world of confusion and fear when they discover something evil is lurking the hospital floors.
Although Epitaph does connect in the requisite Tale of Two Sisters-like "plot twist," it’s at least completed in a method that makes some sense in terms of the characters in question. Most essential of all, dissimilar with most Korean horror films lately, Epitaph is authentically terrifying, without resorting to the typical “worthless Sadako Clones” strategies. One sequence in particular, in which Asako's haunted mother, looking like a Barbie squished by a steamroller, gargles and screeches what may have been intended as a lullaby to her frightened-out-of-her-mind daughter, made it one of a scary scene ever. Epitaph, though not quite as magniloquently entertaining as Black House, nevertheless will make a significant contribution to rehabilitating K-horror's international reputation. With this exact, developed yet psychologically satisfying Gothic horror piece, the Jeong Brothers have effectively verified that they are talents to watch out for as potential directors.
